Category Archives: Volume 31 Number 2 (Summer 2025)

Letter from the Editors (Summer 2025)

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 31, Number 2 (Summer 2025)

Letter from the Editors (Summer 2025)

By Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University

Dear Friends,

We find ourselves at the midway point of the year, which seems to be speeding by. I am pleased to bring you this second issue of 2025, which features a slate of fresh material, including reviews from recent additions to our editorial team.

Blake McKinney addresses the “muddled middle” of Mary Fulbrook’s recent monograph, Bystander Society. He makes a lengthy and complex book accessible, with helpful commentary on how the text will be of interest to readers attentive to questions about and problems with the German churches. Michael O’Sullivan’s review of Anna von der Goltz’s attention to the generation of 1968 – The Other 68ers – highlights the diversity of her material and the valuable complications she brings to a much-studied subject. He tells us that her emphasis on the role of right-wing student protestors is an important correction to understanding the student movement as a whole as well as the history of Christian Democracy in Germany.

Björn Krondorfer offers a review of Mirjam Loos’s German-language book, Dangerous Metaphors (the English translation of the title), based on her 2017 dissertation, about German Protestant communication patterns and spaces concerned with communism, particularly the Soviet variant, in the first half of the twentieth century. Kevin P. Spicer takes on Mikael Nilsson’s Christianity in Hitler’s Ideology, with a fresh perspective on some of Nazism’s foundational texts and Aryan conceptions of Jesus within Nazism.

Finally, Martin Menke has written a compelling triple review of books addressing the history of German Catholic women in twentieth-century Germany: his analysis includes two volumes from the series Literatur – Gender – Konfession. Katholische Schriftstellerinnen, and a chapter review of Dominik Schindler’s study of the Catholic women’s movement and its connections to Michael von Faulhaber, before he was appointed archbishop of Munich and Freising.

The second half of 2025 promises strong issues: our September issue will step away from our regular routine of reviews to offer commentary on how our field of historical inquiry frames various contemporary issues in insightful and disconcerting ways. This special issue will be spearheaded by associate editor Mark Ruff. Our December issue will contain a full slate of reviews and conference reports, including a meeting of part of our editorial team at the European Academy of Religion’s eighth annual conference, held in July in Vienna, Austria.

As ever, I invite you, the reader, to let us know about any major conferences, exhibitions, websites, or films that we should know about to review, by contacting me directly.

On behalf of my associate editors and the editorial board,

Lauren Faulkner Rossi,
Simon Fraser University

Review of Mary Fulbrook. Bystander Society: Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 31, Number 2 (Summer 2025)

Review of Mary Fulbrook. Bystander Society: Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), pp. 488

By Blake McKinney, Texas Baptist College

Raul Hilberg famously employed a tripartite schema in his Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-1945. Subsequent works have often divided German society in the Third Reich along these lines. Some have lumped most of the population in the perpetrator category. Others have portrayed German society as a neat bell curve in which perpetrators and victims make up the extremes and the vast majority fit within the bell as bystanders. While categorizations have heuristic value, simple categorical divisions fail to adequately describe the complexity of human activity and change over time. In Bystander Society: Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, Mary Fulbrook probes the complexity of the concept of “bystanders”— a group she describes as “the muddled middle.”

Mary Fulbrook is Professor of German History at University College London. She is a familiar and respected contributor to scholarship on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. In this work she avoids teleological interpretations of events and rejects simplistic categorizations. She endeavors to tell the story of German bystanders “from the inside out” through “selected accounts of personal experiences” (16). She tells the stories of individuals. In so doing, she humanizes history. Victims and bystanders had names. They had stories. They were not a grouping of data points on a chart. Fulbrook’s subjects are profoundly human, and their complex stories challenge facile characterizations of society in Nazi Germany. Fulbrook’s primary sources for Part I are autobiographical essays from 1939 written on the theme “My life in Germany before and after January 30, 1933.” These essays give a broad range of everyday experiences before such memories were shaped by knowledge of the horrors of the Holocaust. Likewise, in Part II she employs a variety of firsthand accounts and memoirs to tell stories from the ground level. Fulbrook argues well for the value and limitations of her source base in her introduction.

Fulbrook divides her analysis into two parts. Part I, “The Slippery Slope: Social Segregation in Nazi Germany,” analyzes German society from the First World War until the beginning of Hitler’s territorial expansions. Periodization matters in historical argumentation, and Fulbrook tells a fuller story of German society by beginning her narrative well before Hitler’s rise to the chancellorship. She gives a rich account of German society and the experience of German Jews before the racialization of the Nazi period. She demonstrates the shift from pre-1933, when “social class, gender, regional, family, or individual issues had been far more significant than religious affiliation or Jewish ancestry”, to the enforcement of (and voluntary conformity with) the dichotomy of “Aryan”/”non-Aryan” divisions in the first years of the Third Reich (27).

Three out of the five chapters in Part I detail societal changes before the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935. Fulbrook demonstrates that, well before the Nuremberg Laws, “Germans were already learning and practising distinctions between ‘Aryans’ and ‘non-Aryans’ in everyday life, and with far-reaching consequences” (91). She asserts, “widespread acceptance and more or less willing enactment… was key to the broader impact of Nazi racism over time” (103). In account after account, Fulbrook illustrates the complexities of conformity and concern. Many victims of National Socialist racial policies recorded moments of kindness from their “Aryan” compatriots, but these were nearly always marked by fear and considerations of self-preservation. Fulbrook contends that this mixture of public conformity and private misgivings allowed non-Jewish Germans to enjoy “both the benefits of public conformity and the moral glow of private dissidence,” but “in the process, this pre-emptively conformist behaviour only served further to define and deepen the rifts that Nazi ideology introduced” (118). The implementation of the Nuremberg Race Laws in 1935 further solidified broad conformity with mandated racial discrimination. Part I demonstrates the shift from voluntary conformity to compulsory conformity to Nazi racial policies within Germany.

Part II – “The Expansion of Violence at Home and Abroad” – traces the broader and devastating reach of Nazi racial policies as the Nazi regime began to dominate its neighbors. Chapter six examines the spread of Nazi racial ideology among the German-speaking populations throughout Europe with particular attention on the Baltic states and Austria. Regarding Austria, Fulbrook concludes “the progression from conformity through compliance to complicity was massively accelerated” compared to the early years of Nazi Germany (193). Chapter seven highlights Kristallnacht as a definitive turning point for the “bystander society” in Germany. If non-Jewish Germans feared the potential violent response if they protested mistreatment of “non-Aryans” from 1933-1934, the unrestrained violence of November 9-10, 1938 demonstrated the danger of not conforming with state definitions of the Volksgemeinschaft. Fulbrook asserts, “In November 1938, it was neither ignorance nor indifference that shaped the polarization of popular responses, but perceptions of the relative risks versus potential benefits of different forms of action” (232). Simply put: Kristallnacht changed the math for those calculating the reasonableness of aiding their “non-Aryan” neighbors, diminishing the already small minority of those willing to not conform.

The next two chapters detail the horrific escalation of violence resulting in genocide. Chapters ten and eleven examine the category of “bystander” for Germans from 1941-1945. Chapter ten, “Inner Emigration and the Fiction of Ignorance,” demonstrates the widespread awareness of extreme violence against Jews committed in the East. Auschwitz often functions as a metonym for the Holocaust. Fulbrook explores how German “bystanders” employed this practice to claim ignorance: “The popular refrain ‘we knew nothing about it’ generally restricted the ‘it’ to a very narrow focus, such as the chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The focus on ‘Auschwitz,’ or ‘gas chambers,’ effectively excluded the discrimination and persecution of the peacetime years, with which the majority of people had been forced to comply, in which many had more actively participated, and from which many had also benefitted” (311). Fulbrook covers a wide array of personal cases where non-Jewish Germans learned of the murderous atrocities against Jews. At this point in the regime’s power (and usage of violence), she acknowledges the great difficulty facing citizens who ran the risk of becoming victims of extreme violence if they expressed dissent, “yet remaining silent meant in effect condoning brutality and murder, even if this strategy was a form of ‘muddling through’ in existentially threatening times” (339).

Fulbrook concludes with an indictment of both German elites and the wider society, but with elites bearing the greater burden. She faults elites for not standing against Hitler at an early stage, which left members of the wider society in “an arena of repression and violence, in which it was easier to conform” (341). Fulbrook identifies gradual societal change rather than a driving ideology as the crucial feature of the creation of a “bystander society” that acquiesced to (and often benefitted from) the persecution of Jews. She argues that the greatest lesson is to “explore how very small changes in everyday life that seem anodyne or justifiable at the time can have catastrophic consequences within a matter of just a few years” (374). The pre-war Nazi years are more than the “Seizure of Power,” the Nuremberg Laws, and Kristallnacht. Fulbrook’s careful narration of everyday shifts and accommodations to Nazi racial policy in German society show the complexity of human agency and possible choices in the face of growing violence.

Mary Fulbrook’s account of German bystanders reflects both sympathy for the difficulty of choices made under the shadow of violence as well as grief that courage was the exception and not the rule. She reflects upon the emergence of a “bystander society” — “a society in which social relations and political conditions are such that most people would either not want or not dare to intervene on behalf of victims, and in which most people learned to look away” (381). With hindsight, one can see that the early years of the Nazi regime were the years in which dissidence would have proven most effective, yet in those early months and years when so many Germans expected National Socialism to be a passing fad, many opportunities were missed as people just muddled through. Fulbrook closes her book with a final charge that the best way to enact the cry of “never again” is to be aware enough to enact “earlier or more effective intervention. It is, then, vital that we extend our understanding of the historically contingent conditions for the production of a bystander society” (399). Mary Fulbrook’s Bystander Society enriches the scholarship on German society in the Third Reich and serves as a helpful reminder of the gradual developments that lead to nightmarish catastrophes.

While not directly addressing the scholarship of the modern German churches, this book will help inform future studies addressing the everyday experience of otherwise anonymous members of German society in the Nazi era. Scholars of the German churches will recognize the growth of state power in the mid-1930s that made dissidence far less probable or effective than it was in 1933. Fulbrook’s concept of the “muddled middle” may find particular resonance in studies of German Protestantism, which have often focused on the Confessing Church and Deutsche Christen minorities to the neglect of the majority.

Review of Anna von der Goltz, The Other ‘68ers: Student Protest and Christian Democracy in West Germany

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 31, Number 2 (Summer 2025)

Review of Anna von der Goltz, The Other ‘68ers: Student Protest and Christian Democracy in West Germany. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 330.

By Michael O’Sullivan, Marist University

This impactful monograph traces the role of politically right-of-center students in West Germany during the youthful protests of the late 1960s and the left-wing political violence during the 1970s. Anna von der Goltz deserves praise for a source base that includes extensive oral history interviews, pamphlets, posters, speeches, newspaper reports, and correspondence as well as a fluidly written narrative that captures the reader from start to finish. She reframes how the protest activities of the 1968 generation should be researched and taught. This book not only expands the historical narrative by including right-leaning activists, it also convincingly complicates how generation can be used as a concept for historical analysis.

The primary argument of the book is that conservative student activists, and especially leaders of the Ring Christlich-Demokratischer Studenten (Association of Christian Democratic Students or RCDS), were not only present during the 68er generation’s protests but were meaningful actors that shaped many of the era’s signature events. The photographs and opening anecdotes to each chapter alone convincingly prove this point. The cover photo shows a famous debate in Freiburg between the older liberal academic Ralf Dahrendorf and young Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentbund (SDS) figurehead Rudi Dutschke. Lurking in the margins of the photo are young Christian Democrats, Meinhard Ade and Ignaz Bender, who helped organize the event and participated in the debate. Von der Goltz emphasizes how these two students are rarely recognized and sometimes even cropped out of this famous photo to illustrate how the primary subjects of her inquiry have been overlooked. The presence of Ade and Bender at the debate is nonetheless significant. On the one hand, they positioned themselves against their generational spokesperson, Dutschke, and spoke out against left-wing radicalism. On the other hand, their willingness to dialogue with left-wing students and their embrace of the liberal Dahrendorf distinguished them from the older generations of Christian Democrats. Another chapter opens by revealing that the RCDS had organized the visit of the South Vietnamese ambassador in 1966, which Rudi Dutschke and the SDS interrupted, to intentionally draw national attention to the New Left’s unpopular protest tactics. Additionally, the fifth chapter opens with a description of when RCDS chair Gerd Langguth held his ground, condemning the constitutional threat posed by the Marxist Student Association Spartakus while being pelted by cheese curds in 1972. Such examples highlight the often-forgotten role of the right in these moments of protest and illustrates how young Christan Democrats initiated dialogue about reform in the 1960s, imitated many of the theatrical tactics of their left-wing adversaries, and eventually condemned the far-left’s militant turn in the 1970s.

This book does more than re-introduce Christian Democrats to the history of the student protest movement; it also deconstructs the very notion of examining this era through the lens of generation. The Other ‘68ers uses the members of the RCDS to affirm how other scholars have questioned the stereotypes present in so many commemorations of the protests. By highlighting how the “other 68ers” were both similar to and different from the left-wing 68ers, von der Goltz critiques narratives about generational conflict over the Nazi past that motivated student protest. She also questions the period as one of unfettered left-wing hegemony; undermines notions that socio-economic conditions made protest inevitable; and downplays claims that the protests led to a liberalization of West German politics and culture.

Perhaps the most useful analytical frame of the book is its use of “generational unit” as a tool for looking at this small but influential group of center-right activists. Von der Goltz explores how the RCDS related to the more famous generational unit on the left. Students on the left and the right had a surprising amount in common. Initially both units agreed on the need for reform of the university system as well as a political renewal of the republic itself. Both left and right differed from their elders in how they approached the birth control pill, pre-marital sex, fashion, hairstyles, and flamboyant political tactics. Yet they also engaged in intergenerational conflict that would shape West Germany’s future. They disagreed on cultural norms, including communal living, drugs, music, and the extent to which sexual promiscuity that should be the norm. They diverged politically over whether West Germany was in danger of becoming authoritarian, support for left-wing anti-colonial movements abroad, and the use of political violence within West Germany. Such tensions re-emerged in how both left and right remembered their activist years during the 1990s, culminating in a critical discourse about Joschka Fischer and other members of the Red-Green coalition that had been part of left-wing protests. This emphasis on the era’s inter-generational relationships rather than its generational conflict makes this book compelling.

Most useful for the readers of this publication are the book’s contributions to the history of Christian Democracy. This age cohort began its youthful activities at odds with their elders within the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) due to their attraction to the less formal political rhetoric of the time and their calls for reform within the party and the country. By the 1970s, activists within the RCDS became aligned with the mainstream of the party as they formed a united front against the RAF and other left-wing groups associated with political terrorism. This positioned the men within this group to become influential when the CDU/CSU returned to power under the leadership of Helmut Kohl. While the older Christian Democratic generation called the shots under Kohl, the “other ‘68ers” modernized the messaging of the party and shaped foreign policy. Known as “Kohl’s Kissinger,” Horst Teltschik pushed Kohl to maintain the elements of the foreign policy of the Social Democratic 1970s and prevented a freeze on relations with the GDR. He also led foreign policy efforts with the United States and encouraged Kohl’s aggressive drive for German unification in 1989. Von der Goltz argues that figures from the 1968 generation, such as Teltschik, Wulf Schönbohm, and Peter Radunski, played a leading role in preventing the Kohl government from shifting too far to the right in the 1980s and maintaining a centrist course.

Many scholars of Christianity will be disappointed that this monograph does not devote more attention to the role of religion in the ideological outlook of these Christian Democratic politicians and activists. Von der Goltz often mentions the largely Catholic backgrounds of her historical subjects. She also addresses the secularization of West Germany that accelerated in the late 1950s and differentiated this generation from their elders. The book’s coverage of the support that center-right students articulated for pre-marital sex, the pill, and the abolition of paragraph 175 illustrate how they were culturally similar to their own age cohort and thought little of Christian moral teaching in many aspects of their lives. They even became involved in making birth control more broadly available to women, and would eventually lead the CDU/CSU effort to reach out to women as voters in the 1980s. However, a book that emphasizes the “mental map” of these CDU/CSU members misses an opportunity to complicate postwar secularization. Just as this book problematizes the history of generational conflict and liberalization, it could have also developed a more complex and non-linear approach to secularization. Recent research illustrates the overlapping influence of Catholicism and new social movements of the left; there should also be space to show how both Catholicism and Protestantism remained relevant to Christian Democracy even as formal religious practice waned.[1] In addition the book could have added more context about the unrest within the Catholic Church in West Germany and the mass dissent over the encyclical Humane Vitae in 1968 that affirmed the condemnation of the birth control pill. This book already achieves so much that this shortcoming is likely only pronounced for those who specialize in religious history; perhaps its decision not to probe the entanglement between the secular and the sacred in the 1960s leaves opportunities open for future scholars.

The history of Christian Democratic women from the 1960s to the 1980s is another area where researchers can build on the findings on this monograph. Von der Goltz includes interviews with the women of the RCDS, such as Ingrid Reichart-Dreyer, Maria-Theresia van Schewick, and Ursula Männle. She demonstrates how these women, despite being sidelined by patriarchal men, often criticized not only sexism but also the ways that women’s bodies were portrayed in the political pamphlets of the era. Von der Goltz also shows how women of the right concurred with the left on the desire to legalize abortion but disagreed on how to rally publicly on behalf on repealing paragraph 218. The inclusion of these oral histories demonstrates that Catholic and Protestant women engaged in the student protests of the era; more granular work remains to analyze fully how they pursued power in a movement dominated by men. The recent scholarship of Maria Mitchell on a woman of an earlier age cohort, Maria Meyer-Sevenich, could be a model for a deeper future analysis of the agency of women such as Männle.[2]

This book is essential for all historians of modern Europe. It reorients the history the 1968 generation through its focus on young Christian Democrats. It engages readers with its call for less teleological narratives on liberalization and its problematizing of how 1968 is often commemorated by both left and right. It also illustrates the importance of the student activists to the history of Christian democracy and the era of Helmut Kohl. Beyond its scholarly importance, the book is an engaging narrative filled with original research.

Notes:

[1] Sandra Frühauf, Maria Schubert, and Florian Bock, “Catholic Narratives and Practices and the West German New Social Movements during the 1970s and 1980s,” in Dimiter Daphinoff an Franziska Metzger (eds.), Appropriation as Practice of Memory: Inventions, Uses, and Transformations of Religious Memory (Cologne: Böhlau), 345-376.

[2] Maria Mitchell, “Maria Meyer-Sevenich and the Politics of Emotions, Gender, and Religion in Postwar Germany,” in Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker and Martina Cucchiara (eds.), Women, Religion, and Emotions in Modern Germany and Beyond (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2025), 57-84.

Review of Mirjam Loos, Gefährliche Metaphern: Auseinandersetzungen deutscher Protestanten mit Kommunismus und Bolschewismus (1919 bis 1955)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 31, Number 2 (Summer 2025)

Review of Mirjam Loos, Gefährliche Metaphern: Auseinandersetzungen deutscher Protestanten mit Kommunismus und Bolschewismus (1919 bis 1955). (Göttingen: Verlag Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020), pp. 266

By Björn Krondorfer, Northern Arizona University

There are many studies about the role of Protestant churches and theology during the Nazi regime and the Holocaust, including examinations of the Kirchenkampf, the so-called Judenfrage, antisemitism, or complicity with or resistance to National Socialist ideology. So far, however, no systematic assessment has been written about anti-communist and anti-Bolshevist sentiments in German Protestantism during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. “In the historiography of Protestantism,” Mirjam Loos writes, “a detailed analysis of the anti-Bolshevist rhetoric [Sprach- und Denkmuster]” is still missing (17). Her book, Dangerous Metaphors, is filling this gap.

Based on her 2017 dissertation in Protestant theology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Loos presents a meticulously researched, insightful, and densely written work on German Protestant attitudes toward communism in general (ideas, ideologies, organizations) and Soviet communist-Bolshevism in particular. Occasionally referencing pre-World War I events, her focus is Germany’s political transition through the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich, tracing the intensification of anti-communist rhetoric on the eve of World War II and the eventual military assault on the Soviet Union in 1941. While the opening chapter points to a few academic-theological debates at the turn of the century on possible family resemblances between the ideals of early Christian and communist communities, the last chapter briefly outlines post-war developments in the Protestant churches until the mid-1950s, with anti-communist stances, though more restrained, remaining largely intact.

Her study might be best described as a historical as well as discourse-critical approach to analyzing how metaphors calling out the evils of communism and Bolshevism operated within a Protestant milieu. Her sources are not limited to academic writings by German theologians or public statements by the Landeskirchen (regional churches). Rather, as Loos puts it, it is a study of processes in the “evangelische Kommunikationsraum,” perhaps best translated as ‘general communication patterns in the German Protestant milieu.’ This Kommunikationsraum includes specific social spaces, organizations, official actors, media, and mechanisms of distribution. Her study thus examines a variety of sources, including sermons, theological journals, educational materials, encyclopedias, official church statements, travel diaries, testimonies, and surveys to stitch together a rich tapestry of the steadily intensifying anti-communist/anti-Bolshevist and, at times, “Bolshevist-Jewish” conspiratorial rhetoric in Protestant milieus. This rhetoric, increasingly divorced from any political reality and analysis, functioned more like a device to first conjure and then combat demonic forces—to a point, as Loos states, that “can only be described as psychotic” (208). The trope in particular of Kulturbolschewismus—an ill-defined, all-encompassing term to assert that Bolshevist ideology has infiltrated every part of German culture and society—eventually established a common ground between German Protestants and Nazi ideology.

The revolutionary events of November 1918 and spring 1919 are the actual starting point of the book’s loosely chronological approach to analyzing Protestant reactions to the threat of communism. Loos focuses on the upheavals during the short-lived “Münchener Räterepublik” and also on violent events in the Latvian capital of Riga. In the latter case, Bolshevist forces murdered Baltic German pastors who, in Christian discourse, were swiftly turned into martyrs. In response to the perceived communist threat, religious leaders (including Baltic German pastors returning from the Gulag) sounded the alarm with first-person accounts, pamphlets, and articles, while paramilitary forces, like the Free Corps (which included pastors and students of theology), fought mercilessly against rebellious workers (Revolutionäre Arbeiterräte). Those events launched the rhetorical patterns of fear that persisted for the coming decades: Bolshevism came to stand in as a general cipher for an attack on religion, Christianity, Germany, and civilization. While at the turn of the century, according to Loos, Protestants mainly took a skeptical stance toward what they called the utopia of communist social ideals, following the violent 1918/1919 events, the ambivalence of German Protestants toward the Weimar Republic increased, blaming Moscow for instigating discord in Germany (like Munich’s Räterepublik) and accusing it for violently repressing Christians in the Soviet Union.

In the following two chapters, Loos examines Protestant responses in the years 1930 to 1932, before Hitler seized power. She mentions the continuing multiplicity of voices in Protestant milieus during those years. On the one hand, there were efforts of solidarity with the persecuted brethren in Russia and protests against the treatment of Christians in the Soviet Union (exemplified by an analysis of official statements coming out of the 1930 Deutsche Evangelische Kirchentag in Nuremberg); on the other hand, German pastors such as the group of “religious socialists,” to which Paul Tillich belonged, were still able to openly identify with socialism and the “proletariat.” Clergy and theologians could still associate with the Social Democratic Party, and special clerical positions were created for a “Proletarierpfarrer” (pastoral care for the working class). Discussions were still nuanced. For example, official church statements condemned religious persecution in the Soviet Union but refrained from demonizing the Soviet social experiment in general. And there were intense internal as well as public debates on the communist memberships of German pastor Erwin Eckert and theologian Fritz Lieb. In the end both were removed from their positions, in the church and at the university respectively. All the while, other voices, today mostly forgotten, pushed a strong anti-Soviet agenda into Protestant Kommunikationsräume. For example, the Baltic German pastor Oskar Schabert condemned with apocalyptic and sexist imagery the anti-church and anti-Christian agenda of Bolshevism: “Satan herrschte, und sein willigstes Werkzeug waren die entmenschten ‚Flintenweiber’, meist junge Dirnen, denen Morden Wollust [war]” (94).* There are also the polemic publications of Iwan Iljin, who had been expelled from Moscow and whose anti-Soviet publications, such as “Gift, Geist und Wesen des Bolschewismus” (Poison, Spirit, and Essence of Bolshevism), reached a wide readership in Protestant milieus. Loos also looks at the travel reports of the few Protestants who had dared to journey to the Soviet Union during those years, like Rudolf Mirbt, who afterward concluded that the Protestant church had to play a decisive role in the final battle (Entscheidungskampf) against Bolshevism.

In chapter 5, Loos examines how the anti-Bolshevist attitudes, which had become a cohesive, identity-building force within Protestantism, enabled the churches to find common ground with Nazism and its anti-Soviet propaganda. The chapter starts with tracing the neologism of Kulturbolschewismus (cultural infiltration of Bolshevism) in 1931 and moves forward to the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. It is a historically and conceptually rich chapter, and any short summary here will not do it justice. But let me say this: important to note is the author’s analysis of the ill-defined yet all-encompassing term Kulturbolschewismus, which became a “cipher for everything ‘evil,’ completely detached from any political ascriptions” (145). At times, this term morphed into the antisemitic trope of “Judeo-Bolshevism.” Loos seems to suggest that the idea of Judeo-Bolshevism, though not absent in Protestant publications, was far more prevalent in Nazi ideology than in Protestant rhetoric. And yet, it is always appalling to realize how leaders of the various regional churches succumbed and conformed to Hitler’s war. For example, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, church leaders, including bishop August Marahrens (Hannover), sent a telegram to Adolf Hitler pledging their support and solidarity: “You have, my Führer, contained the Bolshevist danger in our country and now call on our Volk [people] and all the people in Europe to go into a decisive battle against the mortal enemy of all Ordnung [discipline/rule-based/divinely-willed order] and of the whole occidental-Christian culture” (167). The chapter ends with an apt summary: “In view of the 1936 Spanish Civil War and the attack of the Soviet Union in 1941, various church committees confirmed their loyalty to Hitler and the National-Socialist state” (179).

In the concluding chapter, Loos returns to a conceptual discussion of the role of metaphors regarding anti-Bolshevist rhetoric in Protestant spaces, and how the imagery of nature, meteorology, war, and victimhood morphed into suggestions of a final apocalyptic battle between Christianity and Bolshevism, in which the Soviet Union stood for chaos and darkness and Nazi Germany for light and order. Moving into the post-war period, Loos indicates that anti-Bolshevist sentiments remained intact in Protestant church circles after 1945, especially in West Germany, now under U.S. military administration. Yet, she writes, divergent opinions began to emerge in the 1950s in West German Protestant circles regarding the assessment of danger emanating from the Soviet Union, especially when the question of German rearmament was widely and controversially debated at the onset of the Cold War.

The book ends with a quote from theologian Helmut Gollwitzer, who had been a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union. After the war, Gollwitzer argued for a more differentiated view of communism, suggesting that communism is not “satanic,” though it might be a flawed idea. Coming full circle, Loos writes, we need to know that Gollwitzer had once been a student of Fritz Lieb, the socialist-leaning theologian who had been removed from his university position in 1933.

Notes:

* “Satan ruled, and his most willing tools were the dehumanized ‘gun-toting women’, mostly young prostitutes for whom murder was a source of pleasure.” (Editor’s translation)

Review of Mikael Nilsson, Christianity in Hitler’s Ideology. The Role of Jesus in National Socialism

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 31, Number 2 (Summer 2025)

Review of Mikael Nilsson, Christianity in Hitler’s Ideology. The Role of Jesus in National Socialism. (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2024). ISBN: 978-1-009-31497-8.

By Kevin P. Spicer, C.S.C., Stonehill College

In 2021, Routledge published Mikael Nilsson’s Hitler Redux: The Incredible History of Hitler’s So-Called Table Talks, a critical deconstruction of several post-war books that purported to record Hitler’s verbatim conversations on various topics. In this investigative work, Nilsson, an independent historian who earned his doctorate from Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Technology, demonstrated an uncanny ability to make connections between historical texts, uncovering misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and falsifications in the process. Nilsson pursues a similar approach in his newest study, Christianity in Hitler’s Ideology: The Role of Jesus in National Socialism, while also advancing arguments initially made by Richard Steigmann-Gall in The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945 (Cambridge, 2003), who endorsed Nilsson’s book. Steigmann-Gall asked if National Socialism was Christian. Nilsson investigates Jesus’s place within Hitler’s and National Socialism’s ideology. Rejecting interpretations of Hitler and National Socialism as anti-Christian, Nilsson posits that both were fundamentally Christian, though defined radically different than the norm. Hitler saw Jesus as an Aryan warrior sent by God to rid the world of Jews and their influence on it. He and his followers sought to “reestablish the original teachings of Jesus, which they thought had been lost over the centuries due to the manipulations of the apostle Paul and then the Catholic Church” (3). While many scholars have written extensively about the Aryan portrayal of Jesus under National Socialism, Nilsson offers further insight and depth by largely fulfilling his introductory promise to examine anew National Socialism’s foundational texts.

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Nilsson is convinced that one must take religion seriously to understand Hitler and National Socialism entirely. He writes, “…we must understand the National Socialist movement and its revolution not as ‘quasi-religious,’ as [Joachim] Fest and others have put it, but as an ideology that was religious to its core” (29). For him, many historians cannot begin to ascertain this assumption, either by ignoring religion or refusing “to ascribe to religious beliefs any responsibility for this extremely violent and negative part of modern European history” (19).

In his sprawling first chapter, Nilsson emphasizes the importance of understanding National Socialism’s ideology, particularly in comprehending its perspective on Christianity. He is adamant in explaining in detail that Hitler did not create it in a vacuum. Instead, it developed from various strains of nineteenth-century right-wing social-Christian enmeshed thought. Nilsson focuses explicitly on the journalist and publisher Theodor Fritsch and the Protestant pastor and politician Friedrich Naumann, illustrating Fritsch’s extreme antisemitism and Naumann’s gradual adoption of Social Darwinism and racial struggle. Naumann initially presented Jesus as a social reformer but soon abandoned this emphasis entirely, focusing less on him. Fritsch openly posited that Jesus had been an Aryan of Galilean descent who dedicated his life to combating Jews. In early 1920, Franz Schränghamer-Heimdal, in a series of articles published in Völkischer Beobachter, advanced the Galilean-Aryan Jesus argument. Others, including Hitler, followed suit, elaborating on such ideas. In a July 1923 speech at Augsburg, Hitler declared, “…true Christianity did not turn the other cheek like a coward, but instead chose to combat injustice and fight for what was right” (62). In his writing, Alfred Rosenberg, the chief party ideologist, similarly argued, “the Pauline churches are thus essentially not Christian, but rather a product of the Jewish-Syrian Apostle activity, such as it was begun by the Jerusalemitic author of the Gospel of Matthew and, independently of him, completed by Paul” (62). Nilsson concludes that Rosenberg wrote here as a “theologian just as much as a National Socialist ideologue….he thought of himself and the NSDAP as the harbingers of real Christianity” (63).

The second Chapter, “Hitler’s Religious Teachers: Dietrich Eckart and Houston Stewart Chamberlain,” examines the influence these individuals had on Hitler, both of whom he knew. Chamberlain’s Christ was a strongman who shunned weakness. Less emphasis was given to compassion for human weakness, as evidenced by the rejection of Jesus’ teaching about turning the other cheek. Nilsson recounts that in 1923, Hitler proclaimed that Jesus did not mean for anyone “to cowardly offer the other cheek, but to be a warrior for righteousness and a combater of every injustice” (90). Nilsson includes further examples from Chamberlain’s writings and links them to excerpts from Hitler’s speeches. The two diverged, however, over their interpretation of the apostle Paul. Chamberlain viewed him as a heathen who had brought Hellenistic influences into Christianity, while Hitler saw him as the Jewish corrupter of Jesus’ teachings.

Dietrich Eckart, a Catholic and rabid antisemite, had even more significant influence over Hitler and instilled in him a fierce hatred of Jews. However, Nilsson cautions how we use Eckart’s writings to determine Hitler’s own thinking. He accepts Margarete Plewnia’s conclusion that the conversation discussing religion, among other topics, between Eckart and Hitler in Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin is fictional and cannot be definitively quoted. Likewise, Nilsson agrees with her assessment that Eckart’s interaction with Hitler in the early 1920s affected how Hitler spoke about Jews. Eckart’s outlook on Catholicism also influenced Hitler, who, at least initially, viewed it as “very important…. In Mein Kampf, he expressed a profound admiration for the Catholic Church as a bureaucratic organization, as an institution with a strong ideology and core message, and as a propaganda outlet” (117). Nilsson laments scholars’ dismissive attitude toward Eckart’s Catholic beliefs and his role as Hitler’s religious mentor.

Chapter three focuses on whether Hitler believed Jesus was divine. He rejects historian Michael Burleigh’s conclusion that Hitler “talked a lot about God, rarely about the Saviour” (17). Nilsson finds that Hitler considered Jesus to be divine. In a 1920 speech in Rosenheim, Hitler characterized Jews as unproductive and work-shy money changers “whom our teacher of religion, the carpenter son from Nazareth, drove out of his father’s temple with his whip” (136). Likewise, in a December 1928 speech, Hitler referred to Jesus as “Christ, our Lord” (147). According to Nilsson, Hitler prayed to God, citing several speeches. Nilsson’s evidence becomes less convincing when he discusses if there was proof that Hitler was a Christian, hypothesizing that Hitler came close to mirroring an early sect, the Ebionites, who did not believe that Jesus was divine but an ordinary man whom God adopted. He also cites a 1921 letter in which Rudolf Hess describes Hitler as a good Catholic. Hess recalls accompanying Hitler to a Catholic Mass (Nilsson refers to it as a service), in which Father Achtleitner presided and delivered a sermon. The original document is most likely referring to Abbot Alban Schachleiter, O.S.B., a devoted follower of Hitler, whose history Nilsson may not be aware of. There is no “Achtleitner” among the German clergy in the General Schematismus at that time.

Nilsson’s book takes an almost bizarre turn in Chapter Four when he examines how Hitler modeled his political conversion narrative in Mein Kampf on the Apostle Paul’s religious conversion in Acts 9. Nilsson reminds us that scholars, including Thomas Weber, claim that Hitler used biblical stories as staging motifs. He argues that Hitler had a “good knowledge of the Bible” (160). Most importantly, Nilsson compares Paul’s conversion narrative, including his temporary blindness,” with Hitler’s own experience of blindness in World War I. Perhaps this is the case, though one must wonder if Hitler hated Paul so much, why would he appropriate the apostle’s narrative as his own?

In the fifth and final chapter, Nilsson seeks to understand if Jesus was an ideological inspiration for Hitler and the NSDAP. He answers in the affirmative and encourages us to take Hitler’s words at face value in our attempts to explain his actions. We should not attempt to dismiss or deconstruct passages, such as the infamous one in Mein Kampf, “Today I hence believe that I am acting in accordance with the Almighty Creator’s intention: When I defend myself against the Jews, I am fighting for the Lord’s work” (181). Nilsson argues Hitler used such religious language sparingly, reinforcing its importance as belief, not propaganda. If so, he argues, Hitler would have frequently employed them. How Hitler read Jesus’ words is debatable, though as pointed out above, Nilsson emphasizes that Hitler was knowledgeable about the Bible. Hitler’s library also contained Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Worte Christi, which consists of 160 sayings attributed to Jesus. As Hitler marked up his copy, Nilsson surmises that Hitler may have drawn inspiration from this text.

In his last chapter’s final section, Nilsson asks if Hitler planned the Holocaust from the outset and, in turn, if Jesus was the inspiration for this ultimate evil. At face value, the question is offensive; however, if you accept Nilsson’s understanding of how Hitler understood Christianity and Jesus, it makes more sense. Hitler saw Christ as God’s warrior sent to eradicate Jews. Nilsson agrees with Thomas Weber that “Hitler and Eckart shared a genocidal rhetoric concerning the Jews from very early on” (223). He reasons that it is “not completely unrealistic to assume that Hitler already in 1924 had arrived at the conclusion that the Jews had to be physically exterminated if Germany was to be saved” (225). Nilsson later adds that Hitler saw Jesus as “the greatest Aryan warrior, that Jesus had fought against the Jews and was killed by them before he had time to finish his work, that is, the physical destruction of the Jewish people, and that the NSDAP was going to pick up where he left off and this time his work would be brought to completion” (232).

Nilsson presents us with a thought-provoking book. It is filled with numerous examples from primary sources and, at times, overwhelms the reader with digressive arguments. Too many of the examples are from the 1920s and Nilsson does not consider this discrepancy in significant depth. He does importantly admit that while Hitler “did not slavishly adopt ideas wholesale from any source, he was not an original thinker or intellectual either. He used what he found in others to create a blend that suited him” (126). One wonders then if Nilsson has read too much into his brief excerpts from Hitler’s speeches and writings, attributing to them too much weight. Nowhere does he ask if Hitler’s Austrian-Catholic childhood and adolescence impacted his religious view. Despite these reservations, Nilsson offers the reader much to ponder about Hitler’s religiosity.

Reviews on the History of German Catholic Women

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 31, Number 2 (Summer 2025)

Jörg Seiler, ed. Literatur – Gender – Konfession: Katholische Schriftstellerinnen, Vol. 1. Forschungsperspektiven. Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 2018, pp. 216.

Antonia Leugers, Literatur – Gender – Konfession: Katholische Schriftstellerinnen .Vol. 2. Analysen und Ergebnisse. Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 2020, pp. 288.

Dominik Schindler, “Michael von Faulhaber und die katholische Frauenbewegung (1903-1917). Zeitgemäße Seelsorge eines modernen Bischofs.” In Katharina Krips, Stephan Mokry, Klaus Unterburger, eds. Aufbruch in der Zeit: Kirchenreform und europäischer Katholizismus. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 2020, pp. 207-220.

By Martin Menke, Rivier University

In the ever-widening definition of church history, the role of women of faith remains an open field. The three contributions under review here demonstrate not only the extent of research that remains to be done but also the significant contribution that Christian women’s history makes to a greater understanding of Christian life in general, especially in the twentieth century. The first two volumes under consideration are the result of a multi-year grant-funded study on Catholic women authors from 1900 to the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), while the single chapter throws new light on the support of Michael von Faulhaber, before his appointment as archbishop of Munich, for Catholic women’s groups as well as his views of the woman’s role in church and society.

The study on Catholic women authors was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and based at the University of Erfurt. Antonia Leugers, Jörg Seiler, and Lucia Scherzberg, well-known historians of German Catholicism, as well as other church historians and several literature scholars and experts in database-supported research, collaborated on this study. Establishing a database of 160 Catholic women authors, as many as the grant permitted, the participants welcome future scholars to append additional writers, especially from earlier and later periods, to the historical record.

Based on theoretical concepts such as Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of “symbolic power” and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, the researchers inquired how these women fared as women authors and whether the authors met contemporary ideals concerning Catholic women. Did they dedicate their careers to upholding these ideals? Did identifiable subgroups exist? Which works caused scandal, which were forbidden, either by the Reichsschrifttumskammer or the Allied powers? Which authors went into exile? How did that experience change their views? While the volumes answer these questions, they lack effective summaries that conclude “indicators of processes by which these authors emancipated themselves from church norms by analyzing their fictitious characters” (vol. II, Leugers, p. 10) The authors of this volume analyze the degree to which Catholic women authors, in their personal lives and their fiction, adhere to the Catholic image of womanhood promoted by both the church and secular society, especially by the National Socialist regime. Many authors in their lives and their works differ from both Church and social expectations in matters of marriage, chastity, parenthood, and gender.

Instead, the volumes offer a wealth of case studies. Some of the authors, such as Gertrud von le Fort and Hedwig Dransfeld, were well-known, while others published only a few works. Each of the authors has their history. The Leugers volume includes a primarily quantitative summary of the women’s experiences, how many got divorced, converted to Catholicism, left the church, lived in same-sex relationships, had children out of wedlock, attempted suicide, chose cremation, were childless, etc. Leugers admits, however, that such personal information is sometimes difficult to obtain and that, given the limited sample, the data are more “symptomatic” than representative. This detailed qualitative analysis, however, lacks explanatory power. The more important questions raised in the project remain unanswered. The authors offer no conclusions about Catholic women’s emancipation, their understanding of gender, chastity, and parenthood. While some suggest disapproval of modernity, most suggest ways of accommodating it while maintaining a life of faith. In all cases, Catholic faith triumphs. Beyond this, however, this rich body of evidence cries for additional meaningful analysis. One wonders if these volumes report results from which results can be drawn.

Determining a work’s effect, i.e., its reception history, remains difficult. The project includes contemporary critiques of the authors’ works, mostly by Catholic publications. Many of the works were considered trivial. Those authors who adhered most closely to Catholic moral standards tended to fare well in the reviews. Those who problematized Catholic teaching or offered differentiated explanations of human behavior were often condemned by church authorities and Catholic publications. For the period 1933-1945, the detailed records of the Reichsschriftumskammer, which evaluated the publications for ideological conformity or at least compatibility, offer insights into the works. One of the regime’s objections was the Catholic praise for virginity and chastity. The regime denigrated women who chose not to bear children. A final measure of a work’s popularity was the number of volumes printed. In some cases, new editions were published well after the war, while other works sold only a few hundred copies.

While the research summary volume by Leugers, the second in the trilogy, focuses on the various types of Catholic women authors, the contributors to the Seiler volume, the first in the series (these two volumes are reviewed here; the third volume, also edited by Seiler, discusses the literary conflict between Carl Muth and more conservative, orthodox groups), offer insights useful for future scholars. Lucia Scherzberg, for example, analyzes the gendering of God throughout history and how Protestantism is often defined as male, while Catholicism is usually described as female. She asks how the authors constructed gender and what role religious affiliation plays in constructing gender. In general, she inquires about the role that gender plays in the thinking and works of these authors. Scherzberg provides no answers and poses these questions to future scholars.

In an apparent rebuke to Leugers, Scherzberg also questions “whether or not social scientific theory can capture the contingency of historical processes.” Social scientific theories often cannot provide micro-historical explanations.

Günter Häntzschel discusses Catholic lyric poetry. Interesting is his summary of the conflict between Carl Muth, who founded Hochland, the premier intellectual Catholic journal of the period before World War II, and who sought to establish Catholic literature independent of Catholic teaching, and Richard Gralik, who founded the Gral as a conservative Catholic magazine. Muth became the driving force behind an independent non-ecclesiastical Catholic intellectual life in Germany. Maria Cristina Giacomin addresses Muth’s concern about inferior Catholic literature more directly. Muth feared that Catholic literature, directed primarily at women and older girls, had been feminized. The first novel by a woman that Muth published in Hochland was a complex account of an anti-Catholic man and the Catholic woman who denounces him as a Lutheran for blasphemous desecration, but also reconciles him with the Catholic faith. Gendered religious identities, erotic undertones, and the protagonist’s refusal to bear children yielded much criticism. Giacomin argues that Catholic readers at the time were accustomed to clearly didactic novels in which the Catholic moral lesson was presented unambiguously.

Regina Heyder explains that while Catholics considered women’s chastity and virginity laudable before 1945, in the post-war era, chastity was considered a burdensome outcome of fate. Several authors explain that Catholic women authors described convent schools as places of repression and punishment, but also, more importantly, as places dominated by obscurantism and “void of intellectual and artistic nourishment” (Seiler, 166).

Martin Papenbrock analyzes book covers from the Beaux-Arts style to post-war modernity. While offering little commentary on the works’ Catholicism, he notes that publishers often commission book covers that do not accurately reflect the nuanced discussions provided in the text. They reflect more the times in which the book was published than its contents.

While both volumes lack an analytical, summative conclusion, they complicate scholars’ understanding of twentieth-century Catholicism. Women who read and could afford books, or who sought out lending libraries, were offered a differentiated and challenging image of Catholic womanhood, one that demands further analysis and explanation. These works paint a more complicated picture of Catholic womanhood, as the views of womanhood discussed in these volumes were ascribed to Catholic men of their subjects’ time, and ecclesiastical concerns about “modern” Catholic women. Most importantly, the volumes offer evidence of the significance to Catholic social, moral and cultural history of women’s agency.

Another instance in which women’s agency proved important can be found in Dominik Schindler’s discussion of the relationship between the Katholische Deutsche Frauenbund and Michael von Faulhaber, a theology professor at Strasbourg and bishop of Speyer. In a nuanced brief essay, Schindler argues that Faulhaber actively supported the formation of the Frauenbund and the Hildburgisbund, an organization supporting female university students. According to Schindler, Faulhaber largely adhered to traditional values, but insisted that Catholic values reflect the equal role many Catholic women played in securing the family’s income. He also argued publicly that Catholic theology proved no obstacle to women’s suffrage. While men remained heads of household, this did not consign women to second-class status. Faulhaber’s view of the family remained conservative. Still, he acknowledged that in an industrial society, a man’s wages might not suffice to meet the family’s expenses, and thus a woman might be forced to work. Faulhaber argued that women from the upper classes should be encouraged to participate in social and cultural life. In contrast, women in the lower classes deserved much support to earn an honorable living. He believed that women’s work was necessary to meet the needs of their children. Schindler argues that, even if Faulhaber’s views seem backward today, at the time, they were quite progressive.

The three works in question raise more questions than they answer, but there is justification for such works. While Laura Fetheringill Zwicker, Martina Cucchiara, and others, including the scholarship reviewed here, have made inroads into German Catholic women’s history, much work remains to be done, work that will enrich the record and challenge scholars to be sensitive to greater differentiation.